It was an unexpected relief to finally be underway. So much anticipation, so many expectations, so much preparation. When I heard the radio call of the last lines casting off and felt the subtle shift in the deck, something else slipped its moorings. The weight came off my shoulders and something resembling childish glee bubbled up – effervesced, may I say? – within me. I scrambled the five stories up from main deck to get a view of the pier receding behind us, and the channel ahead, leading to blue water.

Let me dwell for a moment on the blueness of the water. It looks unnaturally blue, the sort of blue that you’d get from using too many drops from those probably carcinogenic little raindrop-shaped plastic food coloring bottles. Way too many drops. It’s a kind of blue that won’t let you look away, maybe because you can’t believe the color, maybe because it’s daring you to leap into it to test whether it’s real.

Another lovely thing about getting underway was the breeze. I touched briefly on the heat in Pape’ete, but a couple of conversations with folks back home made me realize that I’d not made it clear just how stifling it was. You know how they say It’s not the heat, it’s the humidity? Well in Pape’ete it’s not the heat, it’s The Heat. And The Humidity. I’ve been to hot. Ghana, Liberia, Nigeria – they’re all about the heat. But here? Stepping outside at 7 a.m. (yes, 7 a.m.) felt like walking right into the side of a bouncy castle. That was on fire. You kind of bounce off the heat unless you step into it with some sort of attention.

Being on the water, moving, made all the difference. Sure, inside the ship it was still stifling. This puppy was designed to retain heat in Arctic environments, and even underway with 11 knots of wind over the bow, 4000 tons of baked steel retains a lot of heat.

I’ve been cheating, of course. While most folks on board have specific work areas, like the engine room or bridge or back deck, wifi covers the whole ship, so I can work wherever is most convenient. Like in the refrigerated server room, for example. The problem there is that it’s actually too cold, so I’ve been bundling up there until I’m overly chilled (30 minutes), then pop out to main lab to get back up to “overly warm,” and repeat as necessary.

The work – I’ll tell you about it some time later, but it’s best described as poking at the systems they’re running to better understand them, and help fix up a few things that aren’t running as the IT folks would really like.

For now I just want to dwell on the sensation of being underway with a good ship and a damned good crew.